


Inspired

by Alasse_Irena



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, Merfolk AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:07:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasse_Irena/pseuds/Alasse_Irena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire has always struggled to find inspiration for his art. But perhaps he's just been looking in the wrong places... Or at the wrong people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inspired

**Author's Note:**

  * For [totallyfluxd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/totallyfluxd/gifts).



> You said you liked merfolk AUs. I really hope this is something like what you had in mind. Happy holidays!

“What do you mean, you’re not studying any more?”

Grantaire wasn’t used to seeing his own face so animated; arguing with his father felt like arguing with a particularly unco-operative part of himself.

“I mean” --Grantaire swallowed-- “I left.” My teachers gave up on me, he could have said.

“I noticed,” his father said archly. “I suppose you didn’t feel inspired. I suppose the muse left you.”

Grantaire as a child had had an image of mathematicians as people like himself - people who might wake in the middle of the night with the answer suddenly clear in front of them, and work till dawn to get it down on paper, or on the other hand, work until the same dawn in a black fog where the answer seemed to tease him out of reach.

Grantaire’s father was not that kind of mathematician.

“He didn’t like my style,” said Grantaire. “And I didn’t like him.”

His father pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. “Your style,” he repeated. The closest the senior Grantaire came to visual art was geometry, which Grantaire supposed had a certain elegance and minimalist beauty to it. But the clean curves and angles of mathematics were a far cry from the dark, messy, unsellable works that piled up in Grantaire’s Paris apartment. His father sighed. “Either you can paint, or you can’t. Which is it to be?”

Grantaire shrugged, and said nothing. He wasn’t being deliberately obtuse - he simply wasn’t sure.

***

The sea looked icy and unforgiving. Grantaire took a swig from the bottle of brandy he had brought down to chase the winter wind away, and regretting his failure to bring a hat.

At least that particular failure wasn’t about to affect the rest of his life.

He had been upbraided endlessly by Gros for lack of consistency. “A good artist is a reliable artist. You need to leave behind this romantic notion that an artist is a tortured genius who paints only in fits of passion. Art is a profession.” Which was true - Grantaire knew it as well as anyone. What was the point of an artist who could only produced work three months after it was commissioned, haphazardly and in a haze of opium?

But some mornings - well, early afternoons, if he was honest with himself - it seemed to Grantaire that he was insufficiently inspired to lift his head from the pillow, let alone put pencil to paper or brush to canvas.

The sun broke for a moment through the clouds, and Grantaire considered the possibility of painting the cliched beachscape - glassy green water, iron grey clouds, and that glittering shaft of light - to placate his father. As a child, Grantaire had gone swimming here in the summer, before boarding school in Paris, before the fall of Napoleon, when his father still smiled indulgently at the mermaid drawings his son showed him, and told his friends how proud he was of his little boy. (Grantaire had distinct memories of the mermaids - of slick wet hair and wide-spaced eyes, and that strange stretch from navel to hips where skin became scales. He put it down to childish imagination. In adulthood, he had never seen anything so wondrous without chemical assistance.)

***

“Hello?’

Grantaire started.

“Hello?”

He thought for a moment that someone was calling him up to the house, but no-one he had ever heard speak before had that lilt and lightness to their voice.

“Is this France?” called the voice. Grantaire got to his feet, unsteady, in spite of the fact that the brandy bottle was still half full. “Is this the Republic?”

The sky was clearing, and the wind had dropped. The only this to be heard were the lap of the water and that bell voice. Grantaire admitted to himself the improbable explanation, and looked out to sea.

“Yes,” said the voice. “Out here.”

Grantaire followed the sound, and was at the same time stunned and completely unsurprised by what he saw--

It was a mermaid, or course--no, a merboy, with a slender pale torso, long neck, delicate collarbones… Grantaire swallowed, hard. The boy was only a few metres away, perched on a rock, and Grantaire could see the webs between his fingers, the greenish shine to his mass of gold hair.

And there was his tail, red and glistening.

Grantaire lifted the bottle to his mouth, only to find it had slipped from his fingers moments before, and rolled away into the shallows. He took two steps backwards, tripped on a lump of dried seaweed, and turned and ran.

The crystal voice followed behind him. “Wait,” it called. “Come back!”

***

By dawn, he was sitting on the beach, crumpling up his fifth attempt at a sketch of the merboy. The morning air was no warmer than it had been the previous afternoon, but this time Grantaire had come prepared. Coat, hat, gloves, brandy. The sand was dry, the water was still, and he told himself that he wasn’t waiting for anything.

There had been nothing there yesterday. A figment of his imagination. A relic of his childhood. He had fallen asleep and dreamed.

He pulled on his left glove, which he had taken off to draw. It had been a vivid dream, but he was incapable of tying it to paper. No matter how many times he drew the scene, there was no way to make the merboy look solid. He couldn’t capture the way the sun had shone off his skin, the way the water had swirled round his tail. In all the drawings, he looked like nothing more than an ethereal vision.

“I’m glad you came back.”

Grantaire had some understanding of what it meant to say someone jumped out of his skin. He had been waiting for this, but that didn’t stop his heart beating faster, or his breath catching. He looked up to see the boy on his rock, watching with wide, curious eyes. He patted the space beside him with an almost translucent hand. “Are you coming?”

Was the creature’s skin warm or cool? Grantaire asked himself. Did it crease like human skin? Do webbed fingers have fingernails? He didn’t realise he was in the water until he felt the shock of the cold hit his upper thigh. He stopped walking, but he couldn’t stop himself quivering.

“It’s only a little further.”

Something niggled Grantaire’s memory. The ethereal figure. The sweet voice. The way he had found himself without thinking in the water. “Have you come to lure me to my death?” He wondered what happened next. Did they make passionate underwater love until he ran out of oxygen? That sounded quite pleasant, really, although it was a pity he wouldn’t live to paint it - all gold and green and rising bubbles.

“No.” The boy’s brow creased. “No. I want you to tell me about your Republic.”

***

“What are you doing?”

Grantaire curled the half-made cockade into his fist. It was a gift for the merboy. “Nothing,” he said, childishly defensive. He suspected that in his haste, there were still red and blue ribbons hanging out.

His father took a long moment to stare at his hand, that familiar expression on his face: pursed lips and raised eyebrows. “Who taught you to sew?”

Grantaire shrugged, stiffly. If failing to study was a disaster in his father’s books, he couldn’t imagine how treason would measure up. “I can’t. I think I’ve pricked more fingertips than I’ve got, doing this.”

“Wait there.” His father disappeared from the room. Grantaire barely dared to breathe. He could climb out the window before his father returned. He hadn’t done it since he was a child, but it looked as though he’d still fit.

The rosette that his father brought back was dusty, the colours less bright than the one Grantaire still clutched in his fist. Nor was the white fabric stained with Grantaire’s blood, though, Grantaire reflected, figuratively, it was stained with the blood of a nation.

For what felt like the first time in years, Grantaire met his father’s eyes. “Thank you.”

***

 

In spite of the winter, everything seemed lit with honey-gold sunlight. He felt like he was carrying a bubble of light in his chest, that weighed him down and buoyed him up at the same time. He gathered memories and songs and quotations. “You’re drunk, young master,” one man reproached him, when Grantaire stopped him on the street to check the words of an old song. On any other day, it would have been true, but, “Not at all,” said Grantaire. “Not today. I’m on a mission.” He grinned the grin of someone who’s spent years in prison, and can hear the key finally turning in the lock.

He copied out scraps of Rousseau and Voltaire onto pieces of card he hoped would survive getting a little wet. He memorised parts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. He produced a watercolour sketch of Robespierre, his coat green and eyes pale.

He did endless paintings of merpeople, and of the ocean. He managed to capture the feeling of that slippery smooth skin, of warm, salt-smelling breath, to make the green shine of the hair beautiful as well as alien.

The merboy drank his story in, and said almost nothing, just watched him with eyes like twin blue flames, burning with something Grantaire couldn’t put his finger on, and would never feel.

***

“It must have been beautiful.”

“How--?” Grantaire stared. “Did I not tell you they called it the Terror. It was bloody and pointless. An insight in to the worst and deepest parts of human nature.”

The boy shook his head. A long gold-green curl brushed against Grantaire’s arm. “Look how far they would go for the things they believed in. Has no one ever told you that it’s always darkest before the dawn?”

Grantaire could have wondered that the merfolk shared figures of speech with their land-bound cousins. He could’ve wondered that his merboy spoke French at all. Instead, he said, “Don’t you understand? There was no dawn.”

The sapphire eyes - a cliche, but so true - searched him. “We’ll have to make one, then.” Then he was gone, with barely a ripple, and took the sunlight with him, so that Grantaire was left sitting sodden on a cold, black rock, with nothing but a bottle of slightly salt-tainted wine for company.

***

In a manner of speaking, one could say that he never saw the merboy again. He came down to the beach a final time before he left for Paris again.

“Hello.” There was that bell of a voice.

Grantaire stopped dead on the spot. His merboy was standing on the sand before him, completely naked, and with a pair of pale human legs where the russet fish’s tail had been.

“What did you--”

The boy gave him a smile that Grantaire recognised, because it was the smile he had given someone else days ago - a smile that offered freedom. “I said we’d have to make our own dawn.”

There were a hundred questions Grantaire could have asked. He had never spent more time than in the past week lost for words. He handed the boy his coat, for propriety’s sake.

“Thank you. No one ever told me humans were so cold.”

“Maybe you should have done a little research before you turned into one.” Grantaire was suddenly angry. “What do you think you’re doing? What do you want?”

The boy looked him straight in the eyes, and Grantaire was suddenly struck by the thought that he was far older than appeared. Perhaps merpeople had their wars and revolutions. What terror had this merboy lived through?” “Justice.”

Grantaire scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I’m not leaving you on your own here. I suppose you’ll have to come to Paris with me.”

“That was the idea.”

Grantaire had a vivid mental image of introducing the boy to people as his cousin.

“Do you have a name?”

“Not one you could pronounce.”

Grantaire had never had to name someone before, and certainly not someone like this, but the words came easily (not to mention the visual pun on his charge’s angelic beauty. “I’ll call you Enjolras, then.”

“Enjolras,” said the boy, testing it on his tongue. “Enjolras.” He smiled.

“All right,” said Grantaire. “You had better come with me, Enjolras. I have friends I think you’d like to meet.”

 


End file.
